Note: Citations are based on reference standards. However, formatting rules can vary widely between applications and fields of interest or study. The specific requirements or preferences of your reviewing publisher, classroom teacher, institution or organization should be applied.

"People, international agencies and governments are increasingly concerned about the nature of our food, where it comes from, and the conditions in which it is produced. By close reading of a wide sweep of historical literature, including works by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Keats and George Eliot, Food and the Literary Imagination shows that such anxieties are nothing new, and that we are not confronting them alone. Too often, we engage with our rural, worked environments through the lens of apparently sentimental and incidental literary representations. The book recovers lost understandings of the materiality of life and sustenance for the authors and their first readers"--Read more...

Prologue: Food Security and the Literary Imagination --
1. Food Matters --
2. The Field in Time --
3. Chaucer's Pilgrims and a Medieval Game of Food --
4. Remembering the Land in Shakespeare's Plays --
5. Keats's Ode 'To Autumn': Touching the Stubble-Plains --
6. The Mill in Time: George Eliot and the New Agronomy --
Epilogue: The Literary Imagination and the Future of Food.

Abstract:

Food and the Literary Imagination explores ways in which the food chain and anxieties about its corruption and disruption are represented in poetry, theatre and the novel. The book relates its findings to contemporary concerns about food security.Read more...

Reviews

Editorial reviews

Publisher Synopsis

"Food and the Literary Imagination also enables a different and sometimes a startling understanding of our concepts of literary as well as of commodity production. ... it is a surprisingly engaging read, written with clarity, ease and obvious passion. It is a timely and provocative alternative view of canonical texts and contexts which should prove an invaluable resource for historical and literary ecocritics." (Sue Edney, Green Letters, Vol. 20 (1), 2016)Read more...